Now You See Her

by Lisa Leighton

  I’m too annoyed with her to bother with a response. I just got my ass kicked by Sophie Graham. I’ll take as long as I freaking want. But as I watch her walk away, I want nothing more than to follow her. To let go of the match, to move on. I want to find Mae sitting in the front passenger seat ready to dissect every second of her day, her latest texts from her latest crush, her disgusting school lunch, the statistical probability that we’ll open the front door to our house to find moving boxes scattered everywhere. We can scroll mindlessly through Sophie Graham and co.’s Instagram feeds, escape for a little bit, get lost. I want this almost as much as I wanted to drive straight home, to eat the pizza and ice cream, to be okay.

  But as much as I want to be distracted, as much as I want to talk to her about all that stuff, I’m just not ready to put this loss behind me yet. I need some time to be sad and pissed off. I’m relieved when the sound of the last car engine trails off into the distance, leaving me alone with the roar of the gathering wind and the low moan of tree branches in response.

  It’s strange to walk back to the tennis courts beneath this angry sky instead of running for shelter. But I bounce the ball and focus on the familiar motion of its release, its loyal return. And then I serve with my eyes shut. Serve from memory. Serve with complete abandon, opening my eyes only to see the ball strike the service line with more force than I’ve ever been able to muster in an actual match. Instead of rolling to a stop in front of the fence, it gets wedged in one of the links.

  “Hey!”

  A shout simultaneously snaps me away from the serve of my life and scares the shit out of me. When I turn, I see the guy who was shooting the match earlier for the school paper. I’ve seen him around, but he always seems to have a camera in front of his face, so I’ve never really looked at him before.

  The sky spits out a few more drops of rain and the wind follows close behind, taking his next words with it. I roll my eyes and jog over to him so I can hear. This better be good.

  “You haven’t found a lens cap by any chance, have you?”

  I’m serving tennis balls in a gathering thunderstorm after losing the single most important tennis match of my life. The odds of me noticing a tiny sliver of black plastic are about a million to one. The odds of me giving a shit about his little piece of plastic are less than zero.

  The sky chooses this exact moment to stop spitting and start dumping. Buckets. Sheets. An absolute flood. Rain like I’ve never felt.

  “Um, no. Sorry,” I shout over the thundering pelts. We were dry and now we are wet. Just like that.

  His hair is plastered to his forehead and his shirt is sticking to his body. The thin fabric is practically transparent, and he just grins this goofy grin in the pouring rain. Now that there’s no camera blocking his face, I notice that he’s cute. Even in this storm, I can tell. And he’s only a little shorter than me, kind of a bonus since I’m used to towering over everyone. I feel a flutter that makes me forget about my mom and moving and Sophie and double faults that ruin everything.

  “I’m guessing you don’t have an umbrella?” The corner of his mouth lifts and rain runs down his face, a few drops lingering on a fan of dark lashes completely wasted on a boy.

  He’s funny and cute. I laugh and shake my head, more confident somehow. Apparently my guard washed away with the rain.

  “Guess we better make a run for it.” He grabs my arm and I’m too surprised to do anything except be dragged along behind him. The canopy of trees above does a pretty good job of blocking the rain, and he lets go of my arm. “You always practice during storms?” The boy wrinkles his forehead. Only when I lose the single most important game of my life.

  “Oh yeah, I find that the threat of getting struck by lightning takes my serve to the next level. Adrenaline and all that.” I feel something shift inside, like when you wake up and could swear it’s Sunday but realize too quickly that it’s Monday. We’re moving. There’s no time. “You always trail after Sophie Graham to take her picture?” The words tumble out before I can stop them, laced with misdirected anger.

  The smile leaves his face, and I wish I could take them back. “I don’t follow . . . I mean, I work for the school paper and they’re doing a profile on Sophie next month.” He runs his fingers through his sopping hair and looks like he wants to say something more. I’m annoyed with myself for ruining the moment, but I also feel like I’ve somehow dodged a bullet. I learned a long time ago that my life is a lot easier without attachments.

  “Got it. Well, see you around, I guess.” I pull my hood over my soaking hair even though it’s pointless. It might be kind of nice to stay in these woods with this boy, protected from the mess out there. But Mae’s waiting and I’ve already said too much.

  “Good game, by the way.” His hand accidentally brushes against mine as he reaches up to push his hair out of his eyes, and my stomach does a little flip at the contact. “I totally think you nailed that last serve.” He raises his eyebrows, smiles, and jogs back into the storm.

  For a split second, all I can do is stare at my hand and wonder if he meant the ball I just served or the one Sophie called out during the match, but before I can ask, he’s already been swallowed up by the rain.

  I’m tempted to go after him, to ask what his name is, to forget, for a second, all the things that are holding me back. But thunder cracks and the spell is broken. My life in Morristown is officially over. Might as well go home and start packing.

  Three

  BY THE TIME I GET TO MY CAR I’M SOAKED—THE KIND OF WET THAT finds its way into every last pore. Suddenly I can’t wait to see Mae. I can’t wait to tell her about the random photographer. I can’t wait to hear her dissect Sophie’s inevitable post-victory selfie. Maybe we can pretend for a second that we don’t have to leave. Or not.

  The best thing about sisters is that they don’t hold grudges the way friends do. Mae always seems to have a sixth sense about when I’ll need space and when I’ll need her the most—somehow she’s just always there.

  It’s been a while since we’ve gone through what Mae and I dubbed “the stages of moving,” like the stages of grief only with more crying. I’m rusty, so I guess it makes sense that I lingered for too long in denial and bargaining. We learned a long time ago not to fight our mom when it’s time to go. I was stupid to think, even for a second, that winning this ridiculous match would change a thing. It just doesn’t work that way.

  I swing open the door to my fantastically shitty car. “You’re never going to believe. . . .”

  My voice trails off when I flop into the seat and realize the car is completely empty. My whole body deflates. So much for our sisterly sixth sense.

  To keep from crying, I close my eyes and wrap my fingers around the steering wheel. Something about the slightly musty smell of the interior and the sound of the driving rain on the windshield brings me a weird sense of peace.

  This piece-of-shit car is the one thing in this world that’s purely mine. I bought her with a wad of small bills from some shady guy on Craigslist a few months after passing my driver’s test. Mae nicknamed it the Crimson Wave because she claimed all the babysitting I’d done to earn the money had put me in a state of permanent PMS. The name stuck when the car turned out to be a raging bitch. She starts only when coaxed with multiple pumps of the gas pedal and I swear there are some songs on the radio she just refuses to play. She censors boy-band bullshit with static. My kind of car.

  I turn the key in the ignition, and my bitchy little car roars to life. Lightning streaks overhead and the thunder is even closer now, the horizon an inky blue. When I make my left out of the parking lot, the sewers are overflowing with runoff and my wipers can barely keep up. I lean forward in my seat, knuckles white as I squint against the wet, blurry world in front of me, barely able to see the road. My pulse quickens.

  We rent an old farmhouse five minutes from the school, and normally I can drive the route with my eyes closed. Left, straight, two-way stop, right, right, left on
to our long gravel driveway, overgrown on either side with weeds and grass and trees that no one will ever cut back. But the colors outside my windows have all washed away, muddled like something you might rinse a paintbrush in. It’s like I’m stuck in an Impressionist painting, too close to see anything clearly.

  The music has turned to static and I stab at the radio knob to silence it, even though the rain on my roof is just as distracting. Too late, I notice the streetlights that swing overhead are out, failing to mark my first turn, and I’ve missed it. The sheets of rain make my car feel even smaller, and the trapped, panicky feeling I get whenever I have to climb into an elevator lands like a punch to my chest. I just want to be home. Now I’ll have to take the long way in the middle of a storm when I can barely see a thing.

  Lightning erupts in the woods ahead so low it has to have hit something near the ground. I brace myself for the inevitable crack of thunder. I should have left with my mom and Mae. Stupid. Of course there’s no side streets on this road, no intersection so I can turn around, not even a rocky shoulder to pull a U-turn, not that I’d try it in this weather. Just overgrown farmland on the outskirts of town. My foot shakes a little from nerves as I creep along the road. I could run faster than this, cut across the field and be home and drying off in five minutes.

  As if on cue, a thump, dull and wrong, reverberates under my car like it just broke apart and ran itself over.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Why wouldn’t the worst day of my life to date get even worse? I pull Crimson to the side of the road and stab at the hazard lights. My heart is pumping double time as I consider the storm, my car, what I might find underneath it. With shaky fingers, I dig through my tennis bag in search of my phone, which, naturally, ran out of battery in study hall. The screen is still black, of course. I turn off the engine and pull the hood back over my already-wet head. “Shit.”

  Thunder rips the sky apart as I open my door, and the force of the wind almost takes the whole thing off. I hold my breath and bend down to peer underneath the car. My passenger-side tire is completely flat, rainwater rushing over the deflated rubber. I duck back into the car and dig my fingernails into my palms, closing my eyes. Of course I have a flat tire in the middle of a violent thunderstorm after losing the most important match of my life. There is no other possible scenario.

  Headlights shine behind me, and relief explodes in my chest because there’s no way I’m changing the flat in this weather. A truck has pulled over, but I can barely make out its details through the blurry rain. A tiny, irrational voice in my head wonders if maybe it’s the hot photographer, and I can’t stop myself from straightening my dripping ponytail. My eyes are glued to the rearview mirror as a guy steps out with a hoodie pulled tight over his head.

  He’s way too tall to be my photographer, and something about the way the dark skies cast a shadow where his face should be makes my breath hitch.

  Trust your gut. When we were living in Brighton, Iowa, above a house turned donut shop along the main drag of town, there was a karate studio two doors down. While other little girls at Brighton Elementary perfected first position in light pink tights and ballet slippers, Mae and I learned that we could rip someone’s ear off if we pulled hard enough, if we really needed to. I remember thinking how stupid it was that our mom saved parts of her paycheck so we could take that class. I remember wishing that we could spend the extra money on movie tickets or even dinner at an actual restaurant. It’s gross, we complained. It’s important, our mom responded.

  I open my door a crack and scream over the rain, “I’m okay,” waving him away with my arm. “My dad’s coming.” I raise up my dead phone. I have no idea why I play the dad card, but it just slips out and I’m glad no one else is around to hear it. The man stops halfway between our cars for a second and I frantically turn Crimson’s key. The car does its standard groaning, that exhausted broken-sounding turn of the engine when I know it’s not going to start right away. Not now. Not now. Not now.

  And then I hear him shout our names. “Amelia? Mae? Is that you?”

  I’m the strangest mixture of confused, relieved, embarrassed, and scared all churning together because I must know him and now I look like an idiot for lying about a dad I do not have and for being stuck on the side of the road in the first place. Someone please put me out of my misery.

  I open my car door wider, squinting to see past the blinding sheets of rain, and all of a sudden he’s there and his fingers are wrapping around my wrist, too fast, too tight.

  And there’s no time.

  “Is this . . . ?” But before I can finish asking if this is some kind of a joke, before I can even get a glimpse of his face, he yanks me out of the car.

  This can’t be happening.

  I twist back toward my car, but his fingers only grip my forearm tighter. And I’m yanked to his chest so close I can see every carving in his silver necklace, adrenaline heightening my senses and slowing down time. It’s surreal to have such focus, to see the silver links woven like a tapestry, the circular medallion at the end etched with a man cradling a baby. It feels important. Blood rushes to my head, panic pounds through my temples. The rain drives against the skin on my lower back, and I realize that my sweatshirt has ridden up and I’m almost completely exposed. I’m going to be one of those stories, the warning parents tell their teenage daughters about because if it happened to that Fischer girl it could happen to you.

  You get in the car, you never get out of the car, our self-defense teacher said. Big white kidnapper vans had haunted Mae’s dreams for weeks, but our mom made no apologies. We needed to know how to protect ourselves. Through wild eyes I see the safety of Crimson retreating behind me as this monster drags me away. We’re coming up closer to his car now, too close, and then I’m thrown like a doll over his shoulder and nothing makes sense anymore.

  I have to do something. Anything.

  I scissor my legs and dig my nails into his wet sweatshirt but he only squeezes me tighter, stopping for a second to heft my body higher over his shoulder. Crimson is farther now. Too far. I squint through the rain to see something, anything, that I can use to describe him to the police. In self-defense class we were challenged to describe a stranger five minutes after he left the classroom. We didn’t realize we were playing a game until we couldn’t even remember if he was wearing a baseball cap. This man is tall, taller than me probably, and has a strong, lean body, white skin possibly but it’s hard to be sure through the rain and the dark and the fear.

  Listen to your program. Apparently we’re wired to survive, but I don’t have very much time to listen if any instinctual force is coursing through my veins right now. He’s slowing. This is it. I can’t get into that truck. So instead of listening, instead of fighting, instead of screaming into the pouring rain and empty streets, I stop. I let my body go limp, my arms hang, my legs drag. I play dead. My weight heaves against his grip and his hands slip ever so slightly.

  It’s an opening.

  I pull my leg back and swing it as hard as I can, my tennis shoe making solid contact with his stomach or groin, something soft and vulnerable. He groans as I claw at his neck, my fingers locating the chain, wrapping around the metal so that when he drops me, it follows. For a second I’m free and off-balance and on all fours, the slick road beneath my hands grounding me to the earth, scrambling away from the man with no face. He’s behind me within seconds, adjusting the hood that’s slipped off just slightly in the struggle. I know I’m fighting a losing battle, my fate sealed as a cautionary tale whispered over coffee, in school pickup lines, during mommy groups.

  But I push to my feet and fling my body into the flooded street, away from his truck, away from the shadowed stranger, his necklace gripped between my fingers. Headlights creep over a crest in the road. It’s fight or flight, and I choose to fly.

  My throat constricts. I wave my arms in the air, but the dazzling white light advances too fast. And then there’s nothing but the piercing scream of a horn and I know
this is it.

  The last thought I have before whatever comes next is that I should have at least asked the boy with the camera his name. I want to laugh at the absurdity of it. But before I can laugh or even scream, it’s over.

  Four

  MEMORIES BUBBLE TO THE SURFACE, IN RHYTHM WITH A STEADY beeping slightly out of my reach. I lost my chance to play first singles. Rain. Rain so heavy it washed away the world. A boy with a camera. My stupid car. Thunder. Lightning. Panic.

  The plink of the beep continues, but the memories come faster now, flooding in like too much rain. A man. No face. Wrong. My arm. My body.

  A man.

  A man.

  A man.

  Mae.

  I gasp for air as I force my eyes open, away from this nightmare. But the beeping continues. And I’m not in my room, my shabby floral wallpaper replaced by vanilla-colored walls. The beeps come from machines and there are metal rails on the side of a bed that is not mine and a tray table with a plastic-covered plate, applesauce, and a glass of water. I’m not at home because I’m in the hospital. I’m in the hospital because someone tried to take me. He knew our names. He knew our names.

  “Mom?” I intend to scream the word, but instead choke on it as though I haven’t spoken in days. I need my mom to wrap her arms around me and rock me back and forth like she used to when I was small enough to hold. To make all of this go away. To tell me everything is going to be all right.

  “Oh, sweet girl, welcome back!” I know right away that it’s not my mom’s voice, but it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the light for visual confirmation. “I’m Mandy. Your parents just went to make a call. They’ll be right back, and my goodness, they’re going to be happy to see you up and at ’em.”

  I try to sit up, mostly to explain that I don’t have parents, I have a mom. There is nothing more annoying than when people assume there must be two. For whatever reason, everyone prefers to wrap my single-parent family into a nice, nuclear bow. But I’m too scared, too exhausted to think of words sharp enough to slice through the ribbon.